Archive for May, 2014

Reading biography and memoir is a great way to learn about people very much unlike yourself, people whose life experiences you don’t share. By spending time with people who are very different from you, you gain a sense of just how diverse people’s lived experiences actually are. You also learn all sorts of things that […]

If you really want to start an argument online, bring up the topic of print versus digital in a community of readers and watch the fur fly. Though there will be a few moderate voices who agree the formats can co-exist peacefully, the conversation will most likely be polarized into two camps: those who believe […]

Professional development books have a bad rep for being either dull as toast, or super-cutesy in the extreme. Austin Kleon neatly sidesteps both Scylla and Charybdis with Show Your Work!, a fun, pocket-sized guide to artistic/creative success, that expands on concepts presented in his previous book, Steal Like an Artist. Self-promotion is Kleon’s main concern here, but […]

In a wild swing over to the other side of the reading spectrum we have Lizzie Friend’s Poor Little Dead Girls, a comparatively lightweight YA thriller you can zip through in a few hours. That’s not a complaint: sometimes you just want to read for fun, and PLDG fits the bill for readers’ whose idea of […]

This hard-hitting piece of fiction is not a fun or an easy read, but it’s an important one. Especially if you’re in the position of being able to walk away from the ugliness, unlike Francie, the protagonist. Francie Coffin is a pre-teen living in Harlem during the worst of the Great Depression. Her father […]

Eek. The last two months have been incredibly busy, and something, somewhere had to give. I’m still reading at my usual pace, but any hopes of reviewing went right out the window with a pile of new work responsibilities. Oh well. At least it’s warmer? Here are a few mini-reviews I managed to get written, […]